Austin Film Festival Interview: Horror Turns on the Webcam for Remote

On the back lot of Troublemaker Studios, a woman leans against the wall. She looks like she’s been through the wars, but she smiles brightly and waves. Under the stage make-up bruises and scrapes, it’s actress Adrianne Palicki, who exchanges warm pleasantries before heading back on set. 

The Austin native and Friday Night Lights and John Wick star has become an unofficial patron saint of Austin Film Festival, with supernatural thriller Texas Cult House premiering there in 2024, while the triple bill of Pickleheads, Sell Out, and The Long Shot (aka The Salamander King) were all part of the 2025 schedule. This year she’s back starring in Remote, which will be part of Thursday’s opening night programming. 

Writer/director Steven DeGennaro described the film as “a high-tech Rear Window,” in which the view of other people’s lives and secrets isn’t blocked by a closed curtain, but by them turning off their webcam.

In the horror-thriller hybrid Palicki plays Jules, a computer programmer who has retreated to a trailer for medical reasons and is contending with the isolation of her remote work setup. DeGennaro explained, “Her escape is this website where you can look out of other people’s windows. She witnesses a murder happening on one of these cameras and she chooses to try to figure out where it happened, who it happened to, and why.”

When Alfred Hitchcock made his masterclass in surveillance and paranoia, the idea of people willingly giving random strangers access to a camera in their home would have seemed like science fiction, but not any more. That cam stream hub “is a real website,” DeGennaro said. It was actually his daughter who introduced him to it during lockdown in 2020. “She mentioned it while we were all eating dinner, and I went, you know what? As a horror filmmaker, my first thought would be, ‘What would you do if you saw a murder on that thing?’ All of a sudden. I went, ‘Wait a minute, I am a horror filmmaker!’” 

He immediately called his old friends Josh Raby and Scott Weinberg, who had also produced his South by Southwest-selected racial profiling short drama, “Stop,” to talk to them about his idea, “and we came up with some concepts. And from that moment to the first complete script draft was three weeks, which is the fastest I have ever written anything.” 

Remote is DeGennaro’s feature follow-up as a director to his Kickstarter-funded 2016 meta-horror Found Footage 3D, but he’s not been sat on his hands in the intervening decade. Aside from producing features and crafting sound design for other filmmakers, he also directed “Stop” and a segment of upcoming anthology horror Pendulum – “plus I took five years off to be a stay-at-home dad.”

Coming back to directing, he reassembled the Found Footage 3D team, with Raby and Weinberg reunited as producers with Charlies Mulford and that film’s star, Jessica Perrin. However, new to DeGennaro’s team were Cameron Burns and Aaron B. Koontz of Austin-based genre specialists, Paper Street Pictures (the studio behind Shelby Oaks, Old Man, The Pizzagate Massacre, and Scare Package.) DeGennaro had known Koontz since they met at a networking event in 2012 when they were both trying to get their first features off the ground. Ever since, they’d been looking for a way to work together, and Remote is their first collaboration. 

“What I love about it is that I just get to direct,” DeGennaro said. “I am a producer on the project, but as we transition from preproduction and raising money into ‘we’re gonna go make the movie,’ they took care of all that stuff.”

But before production came the script. DeGennaro described Remote as a chamber piece “that could be performed as a one-act play, [and] Adrianne’s performance is the star of the show.” Before he started writing the script, he studied the classics of the subgenre that could be dubbed isolated voyeur. “I watched Rear Window, I watched Phone Booth, I watched The Guilty, I watched Buried. And what all of those movies had in common is that they’re about relationships. It’s about the main character’s relationships and the arc of each of those relationships as the story goes. That’s what makes these movies work, even if you’re confined to one location.”

One further influence came from the debut feature from The Rivals of Amziah King director Andrew Patterson, the 2020 period UFO drama The Vast of Night. “There’s a scene in that where an old lady tells this story and the camera just stays on her face for a good two or three minutes while she just tells this story. I had this moment where I was like, for tens of thousands of years, this is what entertainment was for human beings. You just sat around a campfire, somebody told a story, and that was all that you needed. If you want to hear that story, and it’s a good story told in a compelling way, then you don’t need fancy camera tricks.”

Yet he also wanted to make Remote visually interesting and unique, and so he wrote the script with two rules in mind. The first was that, except for one establishing shot, “our camera would never leave the trailer.” The second rule of his script was that it would not contain “any screenlife-type things. … You end up with screens where they feel fake because you know they shot this thing with a nice camera. For me, if we’re going to be Zooming with somebody, we’re going to be using Zoom footage, or Facetime footage, or some kind of video conferencing footage so it just looks like that. You can try to duplicate that with video effects, but why would you?”

DeGennaro is used to setting himself complicated visual challenges at the scripting stage, such as having to design his own 3D camera rig to enable the central conceit of Found Footage 3D. He filmed that supernatural shocker on location in Gonzalez, to take full advantage of the terrors of rural Texas, “and that felt like summer camp, because we were all just hanging out,” said DeGennaro. By contrast, Remote doesn’t require all that outdoor shooting. In fact, the world outside of Jules’ trailer only really exists on her monitors. So the solution was to give himself all the advantages of a single-location shoot with all the amenities of a studio by parking up the trailer on a soundstage. 

That didn’t mean there wasn’t any location shooting. As part of the prep for Jules’ voyeuristic screen life, “we commissioned some people to shoot some stuff in faraway places but then that’s part of the project,” DeGennaro said. Friends served as second units, from as far afield as Nevada, New York, Japan, Chile, Canada, and Trinidad.

Even though the film was conceived of during the pandemic, DeGennaro doesn’t regard it as a pandemic movie. Instead, it’s more about the whole modern phenomenon of remote working. “It’s isolating,” he said, “because you’re just sitting in your house the whole time.” 

At the same time, the tech that enables remote working was the only way he could stay in contact with the producers. Weinberg, a longtime fixture of Austin’s film criticism community, now lives in Philadelphia, Perrin was in Kyle, and Burns and Raby were in Tennessee, while Koontz was in Canada prepping his TV show, Revival. DeGennaro said, “I’d have these entire days when I feel like I didn’t see anybody, even though I spent the entire day on Zoom meetings with the whole team. I’d be like, ‘Man, I should really go out and interact with somebody, anybody, and then I realize I’d been interacting with people all day. They just weren’t in the room with me.’”

After all those months of remote prep, DeGennaro was glad to finally be on his in-person set, especially with Palicki as Jules. He credited Perrin with her casting, as the two had recently worked together on abortion drama Due West. Degenarro called Palicki “incredibly professional and game for anything. The two of those things together are incredibly potent, and when you’re trying to shoot for eight days, you need both of them. The fact that she has that, and is phenomenal as an actress, and a really incredible person to just hang out with – and then to top it all off, she lives in Austin.”

That geographic fact was vital for the film being made at Troublemaker. During development, the team had eyed Illinois, in either Champaign or Chicago, Oklahoma, and Alaska as potential shooting locations. DeGennaro explained, “Some of that was chasing tax incentives and some of that was relationships with local crew. But I always wanted it to be in Austin, [and] when we got Annie it was, well, now we have to shoot in Austin.”

Remote Dark Matters, World Premiere Screens Thursday, Oct. 29, 7:15pm, Galaxy Highland. Star Adrianne Palicki and writer/director Steven DeGennaro in attendance. Screens Tuesday, Nov. 3, 9:55pm, Galaxy Highland. Writer/director Steven DeGennaro in attendance.

Austin Film Festival & Writers Conference runs Oct. 28-Nov. 5. Passes and info at austinfilmfestival.com. Read more of the Chronicle’s AFF 2026 coverage here.

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